Overview
Assessment is one of the most high-stakes parts of a student’s learning experience. Yet the way assessment information is presented on KEATS has until now been largely left to individual modules, leading to inconsistency, confusion and unnecessary friction at the moments students can least afford it.
This article presents the case for a redesigned Assessment Template for KEATS, drawing on user research with King’s students and following the design process from Discovery through to Delivery. It aims to provide a practical, evidence-based rationale for the template and support colleagues in considering its adoption within their own modules.
What the research told us
The need to redesign the KEATS Assessment section emerged from UX research into students’ experiences of navigating module pages. During the interviews with thirty King’s students, assessment-related tasks consistently surfaced as the most significant pain point. Common challenges included:
Findability of assessment is the biggest blocker. Students frequently encounter assessment details spread across multiple locations (pages, documents, links). This makes it difficult to build a clear understanding of requirements, deadlines, and expectations.
Submission is not clearly signposted. Students often struggle to confidently identify where to submit, even when they find the relevant section. Submission links can feel hidden, out of place, or insufficiently emphasised. Not visually distinct is a common complaint when assessment submission links look like any other blue link.
Label and heading ambiguity create risk. Participants repeatedly mentioned heading and naming confusion, such as multiple similarly named links. Ambiguous titles (i.e. January submission) drive errors, especially close to deadlines.
Overload from dense or excessive assessment content. Assessment briefs, guidance documents, and submission links are often presented at the same visual level resulting in poor hierarchy between information, submission, and supporting materials.
Uncertainty around deadlines, weighting, and requirements. Critical information such as deadlines or formats is not sufficiently highlighted or standardised and thus students express confusion about deadlines or what exactly needs to be submitted.
Grades and feedback are not always easy to locate. While it wasn’t a primary focus of the user research, a few students mentioned that they struggle to find where grades are released in a timely manner.
The research not only highlighted the challenging aspects of navigating assessment but also provided a clear direction for improvement. Students consistently expressed a need for an assessment section that follows a consistent and predictable structure, is easy to scan, and presents key information clearly without overwhelming them with dense text.
Why we’re doing this
The goal of the Assessment Template is simple: students should always know where to find what they need, regardless of which module they’re on. This reinforces the need for a consistent and predictable assessment experience, with a single, trusted location where students can easily access key information, understand requirements, and complete submissions without searching multiple areas in the module. The template provides this structure, while still allowing academic teams to customise the content within it.
How we got here: solution discovery
I explored a range of real assessment scenarios to ensure the template was grounded in actual module needs, not just a theoretical ideal. Four use cases shaped the design 1. Coursework only 2. Remote online exam 3. Coursework + remote online exam 4. Coursework + online exam in person. This helped defined the right design opportunities:
– How might we give students a single, trusted starting point where they can immediately understand all assessment requirements and deadlines?
– How might we ensure the submission area is placed where students expect it, reducing confusion and last-minute submission stress?
– How might we make assessment pages easy to scan, so students can locate what they need in seconds?
Two design directions emerged from this wireframing process. Both had the same content; the key difference was where submission links were placed. In Design A, submission links appeared inline within each assessment section. In Design B, they were consolidated into a dedicated ‘Submission area’ at the bottom of the assessment section. We put both to testing.
Usability testing
An unmoderated usability testing was conducted using Maze (a user research and testing tool) to compare the two assessment page designs. The testing aimed to assess students’ experience of the assessment section as a whole, rather than focusing solely on any one component. A total of 37 participants took part across the two design variants, comprising both King’s students and members of the public.
Including public participants alongside King’s students allowed us to compare the experience of users familiar with university learning environments against those encountering it for the first time, helping identify design patterns that were intuitive regardless of prior experience.
Key takeaways
Page structure and headings were validated. The assessment summary table providing an overview of all assessments, types, weightings, due dates, and feedback timelines received an ease-of-use rating above 4.0 out of 5. The ‘General guidance’ section was also well received, with the majority of participants reporting it contained ‘just enough’ information which means not too sparse nor too overwhelming.
The submission-flow results strongly favoured Design A. Across all participants, submission links were located 23.9% faster and users reported 20% greater confidence when submission links were embedded within their associated assessments, compared to when they were grouped into a separate area. This was the clearest and most consistent finding across the testing.
Students hold a clear mental model: an assessment is one unit. The brief, the resources, and the submission link belong together. The template honours this expectation by keeping these elements together, making the page easier to scan and the submission journey more confident at the moment it matters most. Separating these elements created a mental disconnect that led users to search in multiple places before finding what they needed.
Looking ahead
For now, implementing the template is still a manual process, requiring academic teams to work through guidance and replace placeholder content directly within the page. While straightforward, it does require some familiarity with KEATS.
Looking further ahead, we have plans to work with our developers to make this process significantly more automated and intuitive, feeding in information from tools like CourseLoop and SITS. This structured approach would reduce the risk of misconfigured pages, make the template easier to adopt for less confident KEATS users, and make consistency the default outcome rather than something that requires additional effort.
When students know where to look, they spend less time navigating and more time on what matters. A consistent, well-structured assessment section is not a small UX improvement. It is a scalable intervention in the student assessment experience that reduces uncertainty and supports student success across modules.
If you are interested in implementing the new Assessment section on your KEATS Module, please do reach out to your Faculty Digital Education team or DigiEd directly.
About the author
Madison Wang is a Product Designer at King’s Digital, collaborating with Digital Education agile teams to improve the KEATS experience for staff and students. Part of the UX team, specialising in end-to-end design and translating user research and insights into practical, evidence-based solutions.
